Can we depend on the schools to solve the bag load issue?
By Stephen Ng
I am sure most of us are not born yesterday to be thinking that school heads can be depended upon to solve the heavy bag issue.
One after another minister of education has come and gone, but the school bags are still heavy that you need a donkey to help carry it into the classroom. But, in Malaysia, donkeys are seldom found except in the zoo.
With the exception of a few good principals, most school heads merely pay lip service to the bag load issue. Principals, especially in the Chinese primary schools, happily add to the burden by making it mandatory for school children to buy additional workbooks, and a whole lot of other resource/ reference books, that they claim to be very useful for the children.
In 2017, Puay Chai 2 Level 1 (Standards 1-3) were told to buy workbooks. When complaint reached the ministry, and the officers were supposed to come and investigate, for some reasons the school asked the children to remove the covers of the workbooks so that they appear as worksheets instead of workbooks. Tearing the workbooks without the permission of parents, of course, annoyed a number of parents.
To my horror, we discovered last year that a Standard Five student at Puay Chai 2 had 29 workbooks, in addition to the textbooks. And, my son who was in Standard Three, had 21 workbooks!
I can understand why this is so, considering that parents fork out some RM200 every year, and with 2400 kids, it fetches a handsome sum of nearly half a million Ringgit every year on workbooks alone! These workbooks are sold at the retail prices. So, where has the one-third of the book price gone to? The money never went into the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) account.
You will not believe it but for Standard Four Bahasa Malaysia, my son has 426 pages in total which, apart from the textbook, included two additional workbooks (half yearly) and two resource books.
If the schools can be depended upon to solve the problem, our children would not have been saddled with heavy bags for all these years.
Education Minister, Maszlee Malik should take a more proactive stance if he wants to solve the bag load problem. He cannot expect the school principals to solve the bag load issue.
A survey that was carried out last year to check on the weight of bags conducted by the State Education Department was also skewed towards the age-old agenda. No wonder when the report was submitted by the department, it stated that books only contributed to 30% of the weight of the bags. As parents, we have also heard our children telling us that teachers taught them to separate the books into two separate bags to make them lighter (what a joke!).
In short, the idea of the survey was to tell parents that they should not blame the schools for introducing additional workbooks. The report diverted the attention to trolley bags which it said were a major contributor to the bag load. But, hey, if there are so many books that the kids have to carry to school, a simple backpack would not do. Even an expensive bag costing RM200-300 could not hold the weight of the books. No parent would want to invest in an expensive trolley bag, if the children do not have to carry so many books to school.
My suspicion is that Maszlee is also adding to the burden to the children by introducing a new subject, Civics when there is already a subject known as Moral Studies. To leave a legacy, every minister loves to introduce new subjects. Our children end up having so many books apart from the core subjects - from music, civics and moral studies to physical education, health education, information and communication technology and architecture or what they call 'Reka Bentuk.'
How to Reduce Bagload
The answer is simple.
But it takes efforts on the part of parents and teachers in order to achieve this objective. Here are some suggestions:
(a) Prepare a timetable with fewer subjects. With each subject, children should be told what they need to bring. Therefore, the timetable should be more detailed. For example, on Mondays and Wednesdays, they should bring their workbooks; on other days when the subject is taught, they only bring their textbooks.
(b) Split the textbooks into a few volumes. After all, it is impossible that the teacher will need the entire book for the class lessons. Because the textbooks are provided by the ministry, I have no choice but to photocopy and bind them into smaller volumes. Therefore a textbook that is 200 pages thick can be split into 10 volumes of only 20 pages each.
(c) Use the smart board if it is available. We are now in the digital age, and there is no reason why the smart board cannot be used to project the school textbooks. After all, the school Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) has spend hundreds of thousand Ringgit to purchase the smart boards. Why are the smart boards not utilised to the fullest? An excuse was given by a teacher that it is better for the children to point to the words on each page as they read aloud. But, my question is, with 40 over pupils in the class, how sure are you that the children are pointing to the correct words? It is now 2018, not 1964. We have to embrace the digital age.
(d) Check the bags frequently. Parents also have the responsibility to check the bags of their children. It happens to my children. My girl, for example, love to buy stationery. Once, I found several erasers in her pencil box. After removing them, to my horror, the next day she would put them in again!
(e) Use the cupboard to the fullest. Pencil colours and other items are best kept in the cupboard. Workbooks that are used only once a week should also be kept in the school and returned to the children when they need to prepare for the examinations. Alternatively, the workbooks should also be split into smaller volumes to reduce the weight.
(f) Reduce the number of exercise books. I remember when I was in primary school, the teachers told us to use both sides of the exercise book. This is to reduce the number of exercise books. It is also useful for the children to learn how to use loose leaf paper from young instead of exercise books. They should learn how to file them nicely at home after the exercises have been marked.
Finally, the children must be taught that heavy bags can cause scoliosis.
Comments